My darling ‘special’ boy is proof NO child should be written off
Born with Asperger’s, Alex tried to kill himself aged ten and experts and teachers said he’d come to nothing. Twenty years later he’s handsome, happy and working for Goldman Sachs...
ARAINY Friday evening in March 1997 and I was alone in the house. Our daughters were on a school trip, my husband Shaun at a conference and our two boys had been at boarding school for two terms.
Their headmaster was on the telephone, very shaken. Alexander, our ten-year-old, had been found on the school roof where he’d climbed with the intention of throwing himself off. I was puzzled that the headmaster seemed so surprised. I’d been telling the school for months how unhappy Alex was. We’d had a disturbing conversation in which he’d actually asked me what would happen if he jumped out of the dormitory window. Then his academic performance dropped off a cliff.
I knew it wasn’t boarding itself that was the problem. Alex had been very excited about going. It was the fitting in, getting things right, and not annoying his teachers that was beyond him.
‘But Alex is fine,’ his housemaster insisted when I brought it up with him weeks before the near-suicide. ‘He always looks so happy.’ So happy he wanted to kill himself, aged ten? I was numb with grief.
We hadn’t yet heard of Asperger syndrome, the developmental disorder characterised by difficulties in social interaction that affects one in 100 people in the UK — and, unbenknown to us, our eldest son.
He was just our Alexander, a meticulous, extremely clever, delightful little boy, with gorgeous golden hair and big blue eyes, who filled us with pride and baffled exasperation in equal huge measure.
But when I look back at that day, and what drove him to such despair that he saw ending his life as the logical solution, I’m amazed no one spotted it for so long.
Alex was in his mid-20s before he was formally diagnosed. By then I’d long come to see his Asperger syndrome not as a disability, but as a unique gift. I wouldn’t change him for the world. I would have changed the world for him, though.
I can still hear the whick-whack of the windscreen wipers along the rain-washed M4 as I drove to his school that wet Friday night.
After Alex was shown in, the head left the room. We simply held each other on the sofa and cried, before I drove him, and his brother, home.
The next night we talked. It seemed Alexander had approached his desperate unhappiness as rationally as he would a maths puzzle. He was obviously the problem — none of the other children was shouted at or unable to fit in — and the answer was to remove the problem.
So he climbed up to the highest point he could, with a view to jumping. Fortunately, he continued to be rational once there. He wasn’t sure it was high enough. Spending the rest
of his life in a wheelchair would only compound his difficulties. He calculated the consequences. st he would suffer severe pain and months of hospitalisation. His teachmight make allowances for a ersile but, eventually, they would go whick to bullying him, just as before. bacd he’d be quadriplegic. He also And nsidered how much we love him, cond the terrible loss we’d suffer. Besides, it’s quite difficult to kill yourself,’ he explained in his matteract way. For years afterwards, I would shake uncontrollably at the thought of my gorgeous boy weighing up the end of hislife so objectively. How could anyone fail to see this child as anyng but a wonder? Apsychiatrist rang soon afterwards and, with staggering insensitivity he hadn’t even met Alex) told me not to worry because ‘these people don’t marry — thank goodness! They can sometimes find a simple, clerical job though.’ And he was deeming alex socially incompetent! Alex was much less ‘disabled’ than the adults supposedly caring for him. for years I worried — as mothers do— that the circumstances of his birth might be responsible for making my son the way he was. It had been different from his siblings’ (he has two elder sisters, now in their 30s, plus a younger brother, Ben, and 15-year-old sister, Rose). The midwife, who had delivered his two older sisters, told me to push too soon. By the time she realised her mistake, Alex’s birth had been delayed by an hour or two.
EvenTuAlly, I asked Professor Simon BaronCohen, director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. He agreed there is evidence of a link between autism and a more complicated birth . . . but we don’t know which is cause, and which effect.
How much more characteristic — and funny — that, even before he was born, Alex wasn’t conforming to a neurotypical (non-autistic) timetable. I imagine him working something out in the womb, too preoccupied to be born.
As a tiny child, Alex was fascinated by everything. Aged two, he saw me stirring the bath, and suggested the labour-saving solution of placing the shower head at the other end to mix the hot water with the cold.
His piano teacher, when he was three, propped up the lid and asked him if he knew how a piano worked.
‘Well you thee, Tharlotte,’ he explained — assuming that she didn’t know: otherwise, why ask? Then he climbed into the piano to show her how the hammers hit the strings. She called him The Prof.
He was meticulously thorough — and oh-so slow. At nursery school, they were given a line drawing to colour of a child in bed. The others scribbled over theirs in minutes. When Alex finished, the other children applauded. Partly because it had taken him two days. But also because the bedroom had intricate patterned wallpaper, every petal drawn and coloured . . . as well as the child’s tiny measles spots.
At that age, he made friends easily: a kind child, very fond of his siblings and extremely keen to please. So it was devastating that he was always in trouble — for being late or slow, or thinking about something else.
His life improved the day I told him to look at the floor when he was told off. until then, teachers thought this boy — who was hurting terribly, but hadn’t learned how to communicate this — was almost psychopathically defiant when he looked straight at them. So they shouted louder and punished him more.
I find Alex endlessly fascinating. So much that I have written two novels with the same hero, Theo, modelled on him down to his speech patterns and idiosyncrasies: answering a question he had been asked long before; forgetting everyone’s names, forgetting to have lunch, while being exceptionally kind and unselfish.
Autistic people are popularly thought to be poor at reading others’ emotions. Alex could read emotions well enough to know that most of his teachers were annoyed with him. Meanwhile, they thought this suicidal child ‘perfectly happy’. So who really had the disability here?
MenTAl health professionals claim a child who has thought of suicide will return to it, but I knew Alex would never try again because I had told him it was wrong, so he’d ruled it out.
you only ever had to teach Alex something once: how to read music; the rules of chess.
I said something else after that incident on the roof, which I never needed to say again. ‘If you’re unhappy, Alex, you must tell someone. us, preferably. Or a teacher. even another child. Someone.’
What I didn’t realise was that he didn’t know when he was unhappy. It is not a clearly defined term. So he spent the next decade studying himself, and everyone else, to work it out. Consequently, Alex can now be far more aware of others’ emotions than anyone. He has picked up on my being upset even when I haven’t noticed myself.
It can be like living with eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; she had to learn uppermiddle-class english very precisely and analytically, because it wasn’t natural to her. As a result, she could eventually speak it better than the people she was imitating.
yet much of Alex’s schooling was extremely unhappy. We should never have sent him back to that school, but we assumed they would look after him better. For sixth form he moved to St Paul’s School in london, where he performed even worse, and was so miserable he was heading for disastrous A-level results.
In utter despair, we let him drop out for his last term and I rang Professor Baron-Cohen out of the blue (I’d heard him give a lecture), begging for advice. He met us out of pure kindness, and wrote an open letter advising that Alex should never be judged in a timed context.
Despite dire (timed) A-levels, he won a place at Cambridge on a brilliant interview and I thought at last he would be happy, studying maths and computer science.
But he eventually had to leave after the university failed to provide appropriate disability support, though his supervisor said he was in the top 150 mathematicians in the uK for his year. Instead, he went to Bristol where he found a wonderfully supportive tutor who allowed him to do everything, including exams, untimed. He graduated with a 2:1.
When my first novel based on him came out, a reviewer said the boy in my story was utterly unbelievable and could never exist. When Alex read it nearly ten years later, he said it was accurate to the last detail.
The sequel is coming out on December 6, 20 years on. Same hero, 20 years older — just like Alex. I’ve written with much more of Alex’s proactive help and support. He is enthusiastic about his alter ego, Theo. After a childhood full of pain and misunderstanding, it must be encouraging to think of readers seeing the world through his Aspergic eyes.
Six months ago, Alex was made redundant from the IT department of a small start-up, for a very Alex reason: he told his line manager not to sack a colleague because he himself was thinking of moving on. We felt like knocking his head against a wall! He applied for numerous jobs and sailed through every exam . . . but failed, each time, at interview.
After several weeks, his older sister, with whom he has bought a house, asked if it might be the awful ponytail half way down his back and his crushed and scruffy clothes?
‘Really?’ he said, astonished. With a suit and short-back-and-sides, he was offered every job he went for, and now works for the top City firm Goldman Sachs.
That long-ago consultant was even more wrong, I know, about Alex’s marriage prospects. He will make the best husband imaginable — to someone who doesn’t mind him forgetting lunch. He’s even joked about me ‘arranging’ a marriage for him, so he can get it right! Would I make Alexander neurotypical? never. Because he would never choose it for himself. In his case, Asperger syndrome is not a disability at all. It is his very genius.
After all, asked recently whether he saw himself as abnormal, he said, ‘not at all. I see the rest of the world as non-Aspergic.’
Anne Atkins’s latest novel, An elegant solution, is published by Malcolm Down on December 6. A proportion of all royalties will be donated to the new Cambridge Autism Centre of excellence.